Emily Daniels

Ah, Foo Camp.

Over this past weekend hoards of thinkers, makers and doers descended on the gorgeous Xanadu of the O’Reilly Media headquarters in Sebastopol, CA. Invited by Tim O’Reilly to participate in a free-form weekend of focused and unfocused conversations and talks concerning current and emerging ventures in technology, it was a nerd’s paradise. There were talks on Cloud Robotics, The Slow Technology Movement, How to Get a Billion Views on Youtube and Better HTML5 Apps. One participant brought Nao, a $14,000 autonomous, programmable humanoid robot made by Aldebaran Robotics. It danced and entertained us with it’s version of MJ’s “Thriller”:

The Makershed was open for soldering blinking LED pins for our name tags and I took mine a step further by crafting an origami brooch around the light. I used a star box for the base and a modified balloon fold for the covering. After I folded the star box I marked the corners and unfolded it to draw the designs on the arms of the star with pen and ink:

Then encased the light inside the paper structure:

And cut the balloon to hollow out the middle and cover the light:

All in all the project took about an hour to make, and the light from the LED had a stunning effect on the paper folds at night. I met many amazing people at Foo and there wasn’t one person there that didn’t inspire me to keep the bar raised high and continue thinking, making and doing wonderful things. It’s important to have these resources and events for people to coalesce around and understand and appreciate the different perspectives and needs of each other. By meeting face to face it’s honestly the only way that we can gain enough perspective to broaden and deepen the impact of technology in relevant ways for it to contribute to the success and enlightenment of our people. Thank you again Tim and Sara and the whole O’Reilly team- you hosted an awesome event!